


there's a part of me that I wanna get back again

by luna65



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abighost, Missing Scenes, Multi, PTSD Will, S3, Will has regrets, multiverse musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 16:12:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4967575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna65/pseuds/luna65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When your foe surrenders, it is only the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a part of me that I wanna get back again

**Author's Note:**

> Taking place in the three-year gap, as Will and Hannibal each consider the implications of surrender.

_If I could feel -_  
_all the pins and the pricks._  
_If you were real -_  
_I could take what's apart_  
_and put it back together._  
\- Nine Inch Nails "Deep"

 

The Maine woods was a place where he was scrubbed clean. A place which emptied him out, there was no room for noise in this relative silence. And he liked it that way. Sometimes even his own voice sickened him.

 

That voice, it was all emotional palettes: anger, sorrow, fear, hesitancy, humor...but never honest. Never completely honest. 

But truth was something Hannibal knew was provisional, situational. He was not angry Will had deceived him, only that Will had rejected him. 

There was a garden where they sat and watched dogs being dogs. It was the strangest thing...he did not build this room, but discovered it, a mnemonic wrong turn. In this garden Will was pensive, would not look at him, but smiled at the dogs. And it was the sight of that genuine smile which Hannibal realized he required. He could remove himself from his circumstance but he needed sustenance. He could swallow the most bland institutional food, wear the scratchiest coveralls, but every so often he craved that smile...a smile he had never provoked, but had witnessed with pleasure.

Tears, he knew them, he felt them, but the part of him which welcomed Mephistopheles as a metaphorical friend, sneered and jeered and fought their purging impulse, their function as balm and as irritant. But one might slip forth at the thought of that smile.

 

His emotions, his regret, made him cringe...for reasons Will could not fully articulate. Hannibal's face, as he knelt on the ground in the snow, seeming to surrender to Jack but in truth it was **to him**. Always, from the first day to the last of their acquaintance, their friendship, their mutual revelation.

Hannibal had surrendered to Will, and Will wasn't sure what to do with the knowledge, except to run very far away from it.

Because Hannibal would not run, ever again. He would wait.

And Will - when faced with an inevitability which might yet exist, some day - felt like he had already died...if not by Verger's command then by the terrifying crushing certainty of Hannibal's friendship.

That face, he couldn't stop seeing it, no matter how hard he might try.

 

They ate a lot of fish, they were enduringly patient with his idiosyncrasies. How sometimes Will might lapse into silence and travel miles away, fathoms deep, planets distant. Molly would smile at Walt and they would talk about things which didn't necessarily require Will's input. They loved him, and when you loved, you loved what you could hold and accepted what you couldn't.

 

Alana was never offended when Hannibal's attention might drift from their eternal fencing, and knew he was not bored with her but rather longing to see the only person denied to him, and she wondered how he thought that particular manipulative gambit might have worked.

"How could you have possibly thought Will would have wanted to leave with you?"

"That is not what I thought. But he is my friend, we all possess expectations of friendship."

"I don't believe you can count on him as a friend any longer."

"Every time Will has attempted to repudiate our friendship he has failed. Therefore I understand that he knows, even if he will not admit."

She felt a sudden surge of anger. "I didn't ask you to rescue him so you could covet him at your leisure!"

His expression was bland but his eyes glittered. "Hope is the thing with feathers," he quoted. "You are rather too late to attempt to cosset my coveting now."

She breathed, willing her heart to slow and her hands to unclench.

"I never would have imagined that for one so fastidious you could make me feel so unclean."

She turned and walked towards the doors, leaning on her cane, and Hannibal's taunt was light as it hung in the wake of her retreat.

"That is always the problem with striking bargains with the Devil, Alana. There is a hint of brimstone about you ever after."

And if his impulses were wholly theatrical Hannibal would have surely laughed loudly. But such an action would have been far too vulgar.

 

"Are you truly going to let me rot here?" Hannibal asked him, as the snow fell and the others were frozen in their tableaux of unexpected apprehension.

"There is no other place for you to exist."

"Except here, I am always here with you, Will."

Wrenching himself into the waking world, bathed in sweat (as always always always), Molly shifting to reach out for him from her side of the bed, several dogs disturbed and looking up, tails wagging and softly whimpering.

_It's okay, I'm okay, we're okay. He can't do anything -_

Oh...but can't he?

 

When your foe surrenders, it's only the beginning.

 

There were certain things Molly had to accept, like how Will might break into near-hysterical laughter when asked the most banal of questions. When the blunt end of consensual reality might provoke laughter, tears, hostility...you just never knew which version of Will might emerge depending on any number of factors.

And she would smile, would touch him gently, lead him back to the redemptive solace of her love.

But she wondered if he was ultimately too hollow to be handled, even as gently as she tried.

 

It _would_ happen, it _had_ happened, it _is_ happening, always. He knelt upon frozen ground, hands behind his head.

Waiting, he had arrived at a moment of clarity and of stillness within himself. And the tears threatened to freeze upon his face. The Snow Queen had kissed him, numbed his heart, the splinters were in his eyes and heart, the vista of the future intolerable in its ugliness, for he had been scorned.

Love, an unwelcome guest, had nonetheless insisted upon remaining, long after the feast, and the dance, and the dawn.

 

"He surrendered to _you_ ," Abigail reminded him, standing beside him in the woods. He was birding as a way to access the quiet center within himself but she had found him, as she always did.

"What was I supposed to do?!" he replied in a near-scream. "Just let it go on and on till we were both dead? Because that was always the ending, for **all** of us."

She smiled sadly. "And how long do you think you can hold it off? Where are you now? On the floor with me? Or in the snow with him?"

"I want to live in a world where I can have something worth loving."

Her eyes grew wide, tears falling freely. "That is not the world you belong in."

"I do!"

She shook her head, as if he were a child throwing a tantrum. Will dropped to the ground, weeping loudly, whatever birds he thought he might have regarded had already flown.

 

"Are you sad I brought you up here? You and Walt?"

Molly's eyes were surprised over the top of her mug of cocoa. "Why would I be?"

"Because it's cold, and isolated." _Like my heart._

"We're happy here because we're a family."

And he smiled, and nodded, and squeezed her hand, but later, looking up at a sliver of moon in the sky, Will wanted to weep again.

_Family is something I am never allowed to know._

For all its' melodrama he knew it was true. Hannibal retained pieces of him, pieces which he could never join to his own heart and make it whole. But what did he have of Hannibal?

A voice, clear in the night, speaking to him above the wind and the frogs and the crickets and the birds.

_You have so much you can never give it back. So accept it, make a place for it._

"No!" he cried in answer. "I can't, I can't!"

He sat upon the steps and wondered if the woods had wearied of his weeping yet...because he certainly had.


End file.
